Recap of the Weekend
Recap of weekend:
Thursday night: Drive to Lowe's, put in order for drywall. Assured drywall will arrive sometime Saturday morning. This is good.
Friday night: Spend night removing the last of the trim, pulling up the carpet, vacuuming the room, and preparing for the immanent arrival of drywall. Call rental place and reserve drywall lift.
Saturday AM: [crickets chirping]
Saturday 2pm: We both have to leave to run errands and so forth, amusingly enough, one of those errands is picking up the drywall lift. Ha ha ha. We left a note on the door saying that the truck should come back later, as Lowe's was mysteriously unable to contact the truck once it had left the store, even though the driver had a cell phone with him.
Saturday, while we were out, message on answering machine: "Hello, this is Tiny [ed: yes, that's how he referred to himself] from Lowe's. I'll be at your place around 2:30-3:00."
Noel got home around 4:30 to find that Lowe's had driven over our front lawn to dump the drywall on our front steps, and that it was starting to rain. I got home around 5:00 in a downpour. The drywall was covered with a flimsy plastic, but the bottom was open and wet. We hurried to try to get it inside, but about a quarter of the way through it we realized that the stuff was useless. I called Lowe's and bitched them out about the situation. They promised to get a replacement load on the first truck out the door on Sunday, and to "clean up the mess."
Right.
Sunday morning: I have come down with the flu. Whatever. Lowe's does not show up, and you can colour me unsurprised.
Sunday, 2:00 pm: I am roused from lying on the couch feeling ill to the sound of somebody in heavy machinery driving over my front lawn again. I run outside and start yelling at the Lowe's guy, who seems to think he can just to a repeat of the previous day's trick. I finally convince him that I'm going to be really REALLY angry if he doesn't get that truck off my lawn. For whatever mysterious reasons (can't be drugs; Lowe's does drug tests on these guys, so it must be natural stupidity) this guy can't just drop the drywall on the wide open patch of driveway behind our cars. No, he has to try to wedge it right up against the house. Why he has to do this is not apparent to anybody present.
He then proceeds to remove the other drywall -- the wet, collapsing crap he left there last night (because this is the very "Tiny" of the phone message) by hand, carefully watched by us. He leaves the place in a huge mess -- chunks of drywall everywhere, but seems perfectly content to sit in his truck and watch while we bring the load of drywall into the house. I will leave the process of carrying a ton (literally) of drywall into the house to your imagination.
By the time we got it all inside, it was 4:30, and our weekend was basically shot. Noel had to leave to go to a gig, and I was just sick as a dog. I spent some quality time with the new cat, Simon (who is just Freaked Out by all of this), then went to bed at 6:30.
Note that Lowe's did not clean up the mess, and no mention was made by "Tiny" of fixing my lawn. Not that they can fix my lawn. What I want is my pristine, uncompressed soil back, not just a wave of grass seed and a hope that making a lawn look like a green carpet will make it all OK. Once you drive heavy machinery over soil, you can give up on it being good again for many years. Maybe I should jsut be thankful that they didn't drive over the side with the magnolia.
posted by ayse on 12/07/03